I can see that scene now and I don’t know why I chose a public bench in order to tell my story to a complete stranger and why, with a kind of brilliant sixth sense, I invested that handkerchief with such importance and concocted a lie that soon ceased to be one, because while my godmother didn’t go off to Africa with her corporal, she did, a few months later, go back to her parents’ house.
I still don’t know why I invented that story, but that, I suppose, is what I’ve continued to do to this day.
AN EPISODE FROM NATIONAL HISTORY
I REMEMBER THE THICK LIPS, the hiccoughing laugh and the check scarf of that small, skinny boy with innocent eyes and a man’s gruff voice, who, at only eleven, poor thing, was burdened with the name of Plácido Dornaleteche, and with whom, at that tender age, I was doubtless unwittingly bound by the shared oddity of our names. We would leave school, go round the corner of Mártires de Alcalá and up Santa Cruz de Marcenado, but we took a very long time to reach the corner of Conde-Duque because we were talking and laughing so much and, when we did arrive, we would continue to stand there chatting, with neither ears nor time for clocks, until he crossed the road and walked along by the barracks to Leganitos, while I continued straight on and went in the street door of No. 4. We were studying for the first year of our bachillerato (a shrill word that set our teeth on edge) with names that were full of bounty and light, like Antonio Machado, Helena Gómez-Moreno and Julia or Carmen Burell, and others that were full of fear and foreboding, like that of the miserly-looking man, unshaven, grizzle-haired and wild-eyed, who was the author of at least one book on mathematics — ours — and who would occasionally spin the class globe and then gleefully, noisily spit on it. Like us, he had been weighed down as a child with a problematic name: Adoración Ruiz Tapiador.
I remember Plácido trying to instil in me the radiant hope of his beliefs or, rather, those of his older brother, whom I never met, but who apparently wore — for reasons I did not entirely understand — a blue shirt with red arrows embroidered on the breast pocket and who sang a song that my friend would perform with appropriately martial gestures, and of which I remember only — although possibly not exactly — the first two lines: “Marching along the white road / comes a strong and gallant lad…” And he would ask if I knew Marx. Who? Carlos Marx. And I would say No, although he obviously didn’t know him very well either, because he would say, oh, no matter, but what my brother and his comrades want, you see, is the nationalization of that Marx fellow’s doctrine; he was Russian or something, an atheist and a good-for-nothing, but he had some useful ideas about bringing bosses and workers together and uniting them once and for all in fraternity and justice. Plácido was like a small, bright, whitewashed window, full of pots of geraniums, through which I could see Madrid and my mother and grandmother’s village flooded with sunlight and happiness, so much so that my sheer impatience to see this change come about quite overwhelmed me with contentment, because in my mother’s village there were always a lot of men standing around in the square, and in Madrid we were constantly seeing the riot police cordoning off fires or baton-charging students.
I was due to take my exams that year, 1935–36, and in late March we moved from No. 4 Santa Cruz de Marcenado to No. 9 Españoleto, and I doubtless gave Plácido Dornaleteche my new address, although I had never been to his house and knew only the name of the street.
On 18 July, the offended parties on both left and right decided to improve Spain by destroying it and plunged into a civil war with horrific massacres perpetrated by both sides, and we would-be high-school graduates living in Madrid were unable to continue our studies until well into 1937. We had to stand in long queues in order to satisfy our hunger with lentils, sweet potatoes and sunflower seeds and make day-long walks to vegetable gardens outside the city and to nearby villages, only to return with a loaf of bread or three lettuces, but we boys took advantage of the barricades in the streets to hurl stones at the war, and each evening the radio bulletin about the war wafted out through the open windows, seeming to spread and thicken the blood-dark twilight.
In 1937, our apartment filled up with evacuees: an elderly lady from my mother’s village, a couple — friends of the family — and their three daughters, two of my father’s sisters, María and Nazaria, along with their husbands and sons, three of whom were intermittently sent off to fight on the government fronts in Talavera and Brihuega, at the battle of Brunete, and at Casa de Campo in Madrid. There were only three of us, but we managed to squeeze another seventeen people into our apartment.
It must have been one day in January 1938 when I came back from school to be informed by my father’s indolent new wife, whose usual indifference was made all the more exasperating by her inexactitudes and hesitations:
“A lady came with her son; she said he was a friend of yours.”
“Who?”
“Doleteche or Dorteche or something.”
“Do you mean Dornaleteche?”
“Yes, that sounds about right.”
“And?”
“Nothing. They just came to ask if we could help them.”
“Had something happened?”
“I don’t know. She said a son or her husband had been killed, or both, I’m not sure.”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
“Well, she was speaking really softly, almost crying, and because, at that point, your Aunt María came out into the corridor and told them: ‘We don’t want any fascists here!’”
“And what did they say?”
“What could they say? They left.”
I kept grimly pestering both my aunt and my stepmother all afternoon and learnt that Plácido — who had probably been the one who had persuaded his mother to come and ask his old schoolmate for help and who was normally a real chatterbox — didn’t say a word, that neither of them was wearing black and that the mother, whom I had never met, had greying hair and was nothing but skin and bone. My Aunt María, who occasionally fancied herself as another La Pasionaria, claimed she had said what she said because her sons—“Your cousins,” she screamed — were risking their lives at the front every day, but that didn’t mean — she added illogically — that she wished my friend and his mother ill, because God and the Holy Virgin knew that all she wanted was for the fascists to be defeated and for the war to end.
The war ended a year later, and most of us adolescents, for a longer or shorter period, wore the blue shirt, which no longer meant the same as the blue shirt for which my friend’s brother and possibly his father had died. For years, Spain’s tattered skin was an altar besieged by many funerals, although beneath the black trousers and the blue shirts and the red berets there seethed fierce passions — fear, ambition, guilt, revenge — passions that you could feel incubating in the icy silence of those endless masses for the dead.
And, when our time came, most of us students did our training for military service in the university militias, and it was in one of those long lines of tents, when a captain was doing the roll call, that I heard the name Plácido Dornaleteche, and, as soon as I could get away, I went to look for him, hoping we would be able to reminisce about those conversations in the street after school, our school being the Instituto Calderón de la Barca, a vast house that had originally belonged to the Jesuits until the republicans cleansed it by fire and changed it into a secular institution.